Archive Spotlight: The Image of Black Women in Film Advertising as Seen in the BFC/A's Hatch-Billops Collection

Founded in 1975 by African American filmmaker and artist Camille Billops and her husband, filmmaker and theater scholar James V. Hatch, the Hatch-Billops Collection, Inc., is a research library that collects materials encompassing all of the black cultural arts.¹ What began as a resource for their teaching careers blossomed into a large archive that includes interviews with black artists, slides and photographs, a reference library, and other resources that document African American culture, especially theater.

Not to be confused with the Hatch-Billops Collection, Inc., is the Indiana University Black Film Center/Archive's collection of materials called the Hatch-Billops Collection. It was donated to the BFC/A by Hatch and Billops in September 1992. The largest portion of the collection consists of film publicity—including newspaper advertisement clippings, press books, and press sheets—from 1937 to 1977, with the bulk coming from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s.

Throughout this later period that included the blaxploitation era, one common element evident in film advertising is the sexualization of women—both black and white. Black men also get their fair share of sexualized images during this period, although similar depictions of white males are conspicuously absent. Women, however, are undoubtedly represented as lower in the social order given that even when they are not portrayed as appendages to men in advertisements for films such as Superfly (1972, Warner Bros.), The Mack (1973, Cinerama), and The Black Godfather (1974, Cinemation), they are depicted as one-dimensional wet dreams, as in publicity for such movies as Black Mama, White Mama (1973, American International). What better way to get moviegoers to see a picture than to tease them in the publicity with its most tawdry scenes, right?

Well, not so fast. In many of these advertisements, the visual images displayed are specifically for the publicity and are not scenes taken directly from the movie. In other words, these salacious pictures featuring bodacious bosoms and bulging behinds were often created exclusively for the advertising campaign. For example, only two of the five scantily clad women depicted in the advertisement collage for Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970, United Artists) bear any resemblance to female characters or scenes in the movie. Looking at this image, complete with the massive phallic firearms held by the two principal characters played by Godfrey Cambridge and Raymond St. Jacques, one could easily assume that the film is soft-core pornography.

That is not to say that films such as this do not have similarly problematic representations of women within the pictures themselves that in many cases outdo the publicity in their exaggeration of women as sexual objects. Cotton Comes to Harlem, for instance, contains many scenes of women in sexy outfits and even a couple of nude scenes while complex female characters are almost entirely absent, so the advertising can hardly be considered false. But these are, for the most part, ancillary to the plot.² Still, it is deceptive advertising because, by placing these hypersexualized images of women front and center in the advertisements, the promoters are making it appear as though that is the main point.

Of course, for some blaxploitation movies, sexual exploitation is indeed the chief aim. What you see in the advertisement is absolutely what you get. Movies with badass women getting even with "the man" were also a popular phenomenon during this period, even if, paradoxically, they were usually fighting other women in order to do so. But do not assume these were liberated women created by Hollywood as a result of the women's movement, for the images and portrayals included in the publicity can hardly be seen as advancing the cause of feminism. On the contrary, these films were clearly marketed to heterosexual males.³

One of the most recognizable examples of this subgenre is Foxy Brown (1974, American International), starring Pam Grier. The advertisement included in the Hatch-Billops Collection shows Grier, in an evening gown that deftly accentuates all her physical attributes, looking alluringly at the reader amid a...